The Text Creation Partnership is quickly arriving at a major milestone: starting January 1, 2015, all restrictions will be lifted from EEBO-TCP Phase I, which consists of the first 25,000 texts transcribed and encoded by the TCP from 2000-2009.

These 25,000 (plus a few hundred) texts will be freely available to anyone wishing to use them, and there will no longer be any restrictions on sharing these files. They will be licensed under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0 Universal), which will be indicated in the header of each text.

But what does this news mean for users of the EEBO-TCP Phase I texts? Readmore »

In 2013, the TCP and the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) teamed up to offer an article prize with the aim of recognizing and rewarding original research that makes substantial and significant use of digitized archives of Renaissance print and manuscript source materials, and which engages thoughtfully with these resources. New scholarly articles published on or after January 1, 2012 were eligible for consideration.

Fifteen entries were submitted and evaluated this winter by a team of judges including representatives from RSA and two from the TCP’s own staff. A winner was chosen and announced at the 2014 meeting of the RSA’s annual meeting in New York. We’re delighted now to share the news more broadly:

The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) and the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) are pleased to award the inaugural prize in Digital Renaissance Research to Dr. Byron Hamann, Department of Art and Architecture at Ohio State University. Dr. Hamann’s article, entitled “Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala,” Art History 36, n. 3 (2013). The article relies on a digital recreation of a now-lost 16th century Mexican painted textile that reconstructs the visual effect of the document as whole. It uses this recreation to argue that we are better able to understand both the meaning of individual scenes as well as the polemic argument of the narrative textile as a whole. The judges were impressed with the way that Hamann’s research used a digital recreation to investigate issues of materiality, iconography, cleverness, and the structures of Native American history-writing, as well as its thoroughness and accuracy in citing the digital sources.

In speaking with our users and colleagues around the world, we’ve learned that transparent citation of and critical engagement with digitized historical materials is a real challenge for many scholars, who often prefer to cite the original materials than point to a digital surrogate—even if only the digital surrogate was consulted. The TCP hopes that this prize will serve to recognize the work of scholars doing this well, and help to spur on conversations and development of best practices in this area.

We extend our hearty congratulations to Dr. Hamann and our thanks to all those who submitted articles for consideration this year.

Regular users of EEBO-TCP may have noticed that the corpus recently grew by a few thousand texts. As of March 2014, 3,913 new titles have been released, bringing the total number of texts in Phase II to 22,971! The complete EEBO-TCP corpus (Phases I and II together) now contains 48,339 books.

To explore the titles in the most recent batch, visit the Michigan interface linked above and try a bibliographic search for ‘2013-12′ in the citation:

A screenshot of the EEBO-TCP search interface, demonstrating how to find the latest batch of texts by searching for the date 2013-12 in the citation field.

Authorized users who use the EEBO-TCP XML-encoded text files for local research may already access this new batch via Box.com. (If you would like access to these files—for example, as the basis for a new edition you’re working on, or as a dataset for a text mining project—please contact us!)

The new texts should also appear in EEBO after ProQuest’s next update, scheduled for June 2014.

What is the TCP?

The Text Creation Partnership creates standardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early print books. We transcribe and mark up the text from the millions of page images in ProQuest's Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex's Evans Early American Imprints.

This work, and the resulting text files, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. All of the TCP's work will be released the public domain for anyone to use.